And Then There Were None; Great War Edition

The last living veteran of the Great War has died.

A woman thought to be the world's last known surviving service member of World War I has died aged 110.

Florence Green, from King's Lynn, Norfolk, served as a mess steward at RAF bases in Marham and Narborough.

She died in her sleep on Saturday night at Briar House care home, King's Lynn. Mrs Green had been due to celebrate her 111th birthday on 19 February.

And so that war becomes the sole province of the historians, it no longer belongs to the participants.

The destruction wreaked by the Great War took over seventy years to settle out and arguably has not finished reverberating. A war that began when one empire (Austro-Hungarian) sought to punish a smaller nation (Serbia) with a brief war led to the destruction of four empires (German, Ottoman, Imperial Russian and Austro-Hungarian). It led to the eventual creation of the state of Israel. The carnage and cost of the war effectively ended France as a global military power and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. It led to the end in Europe of nations that were effective monarchies, the ones that remain are essentially ceremonial figureheads and tourist attractions. And, due not in any small part to the vindictiveness of the French, it led to the most industrialized genocide yet known.

Now there is nobody left to say "I was there."

Whether due to the number of still-living veterans or the existence of far superior and far more voluminous motion-picture footage, the Second World War is the one that people talk more about. But it can be argued that the two wars were really one extended conflict with a 21 year cease-fire inbetween the two periods of conflict. I disagree with that, only to the extent that it treats both wars as being inevitable. I hold that war is only inevitable to the extent that hubris and folly supplant wisdom.

The creation of the European Union and of the Euro currency were all aftereffects of the First and Second World Wars. The idea was to bind the states of Europe close enough economically so that it was in no one nation's interest to settle their differences with their neighbors by the rifle.

So far, the jury is still out on that.